I’m not going to retype all my comments from over on Dan’s post about the latest Digg controversy, but I did want to mention it on here in case anyone didn’t catch it.
Basically, the short summary is that Digg took down posts regarding some legally questionable content (as they clearly say in their TOS that they reserve the right to do) and their “wonderful” users reacted by flooding the site with multiple posts containing the “naughty” info, demanding control over a site that (for some reason) they thought was “theirs”.
To make matters even worse, one of the founders eventually caved to the pressure and allowed the posts, explicitly saying that he changed their policy in response to that kind of user reaction. I don’t have an opinion on either way on the specific content in question (they should be able to decide post it or not, and I’d understand both positions), but the fact that they let that kind of behavior dictate their decisions is a bad sign to me.
I’ve mentioned before that I disagree with the opinion that the rating model and user community of Digg makes it a good source for news, and this debacle only cements my opinion in that regard. I’ll pass on trusting that kind of a user base to tell me what news I should be reading.
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You should rephrase it to the majority of Digg users are morons. Because a lot of very respectable people use Digg regularly.
Like Dan for one. Wait …
you will read this parody - http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2007/05/digg_founder_pl.html
Nate: yeah, that was pretty funny.
I think I’ll leave the title; it’s pretty obvious that it’s a generalization, and I don’t actually believe that every single user of Digg is a moron.
The point is after that whole fiasco illustrated how much influence the ones who ARE morons have over the site, it might as well be ALL the users who are morons - the end result is pretty much the same.
The Digg story was on the front page of the LA Times.
Can they be sued?
I don’t know legally whether a lawsuit would be successful. (Of course anyone can sue anyone else for anything, whether it gets thrown out of court or whether they have any chance of winning is another matter).
I’d hope that they couldn’t be. I agree in principle with the position that posting the key is OK to do. For one thing, it’s already public knowledge at this point (at least to the people they’re worried about exploiting it).
For another, the industry already has a means in place for dealing with the inevitable “leakage” of these keys; now we get to find out whether that strategy will work for them. Basically, (if I understand correctly) players are required to support having their current keys revoked if they get compromised. This is obviously much easier to do with software-only players (as opposed to regular consumer hardware players), so it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
If anything, it will lead (for better or worse, depending on how you feel about this) to more effective DRM in the future. I’d predict that eventually, the model for players and content will have to drastically change. Whether this would mean (1) requiring an active internet connection to allow playback at all, because that’s the only way I could see them being able to easily revoke and issue new keys and other updates to keep up with the cracking, and/or (2) drastically changing content distribution to the point that all content you buy is distributed digitally and individually encrypted so that only your player can play it. They’d probably need a combination of both to truly be effective.
http://calacanis.com/podcasts/calacaniscast26.mp3
Skip the first part before the guy from the EFF comes on.
That was pretty good, although Calacanis always bugs me.
I noticed he likes to pimp GoDaddy quite a lot too - like someone else I know…
He really bugs me too but I do have respect for him since his pimping of GD and other sponsors is all for the kids which he gives 100% of the money from that show to college funds for city kids. And it’s not because he’s just rich and doesn’t need the money he does it because he cares. I know this because of a huge fight he had on an old Gilmor Gang member (I think it was doc Searls of all people) about helping a few kids.
So he pimps for kids I pimp because I’m not ignorant or an idiot.
Yeah, I didn’t know about the charity thing; I guess I’ll have to give him more credit from now on.